Just for the record

Something happened during USAF veteran Gerry Flood’s Cold War duty in Alaska, and it had been bugging the retired military air traffic control radar operator for nearly half a century. As the years passed and turned to decades, he saw and read “a lot of bullshit UFO stories,” which got him to wrestling with his own piece of peculiar data. It was all ancient history, of course, but from his home in Birmingham, Mich., Flood recalls, “I figured I’ve got to make a record and put it out there somewhere, because this was a legitimate radar event and I would’ve been considered a trained witness.”

What else could a UFO making right-angle turns at 5,000 mph and detected by at least three radar stations be but an ice cloud?/CREDIT: 123rf.com

So in 2005, the old ATC guy decided to post his first-hand account at the UFO Evidence web site, where you can get the detailed account today. Scene-setter: Early 1958, January-February, Eielson Air Force Base outside Fairbanks, home to nuclear weapons and state-of-the-art U-2 surveillance technology, just months after the Soviet Union rattled the West with its successful launch of Sputnik. Sometime in the wee hours, 2-3 a.m., Flood was watching the scope when a target popped up and began logging speeds of up to 5,000 mph, sometimes at right angles. (NASA wouldn’t be able to reach those velocities with an experimental plane until 2004, when the unmanned X-43A managed to hit Mach 7 before exploding off California after an 11-second run.) With an assist from a search radar antenna, he was able to gauge its upper altitudes at 55,000 feet and beyond.

Flood alerted Distant Early Warning Line outposts as well as ground control approach counterparts at Ladd AFB, all of whom managed to track the bogey for up to four hours. But it stayed confined to a relatively narrow area and made no aggressive moves. Ultimately, around daybreak, a T-33 and a helicopter were ordered up for a look-see, but pilots reported only an “ice cloud” over a LAFB energy plant.

“Well, that didn’t just didn’t fit; the thing was moving all around and it was too high, it was going too fast, and it was picked up on multiple radars,” says Flood, 76. “And the right angle turns it was making — no human being could’ve survived that.”

So Flood’s report languished in virtual obscurity until recently, when he was contacted by Tampa Bay MUFON state section director Bill Schroeder.

“Gerry was great — he’d sat on this stuff for 50 years and when I talked with him he was babbling like a kid who’d just hit a home run,” says Schroeder. “He just didn’t care what people thought anymore.”

7 comments on “Just for the record”

Let’s see…an object going thousands of miles an hour makes right angle turns and is tracked for hours on radar making right angle turns. Two possibilities…we ignore the evidence, or an alien space craft. Which shall we choose? Which requires fewer assumptions? Hmmmm. Puzzling.

Let’s see…an object going thousands of miles an hour explodes in the atmosphere. Two possibilities…an asteroid penetrating earths atmosphere, or an alien space craft. Which shall we choose? Which requires fewer assumptions? Hmmmm. Puzzling.

@freeman69:
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Here’s a couple of links:
.http://www.mobileradar.org/radar_descptn_1.html (specs for CPN-4, air-transportable version of the MPN-11)http://www.radartutorial.eu/druck/Book1.pdf (radar tutorial)
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I haven’t had time to analyze fully, but the tutorial does offer some interesting information on radar limitations, and, by extension, design tradeoffs.
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ATC ‘search’ radars only need to ‘see’ far enough to acquire and direct aircraft to a proper guide path for landing, which is handled by the ‘precision’ radar system.
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Other radars cited in the report are ‘short range’ ATC (GCA, AA) types. They might not be designed for high-altitude (50-55k foot) acquisition.

It’s possible that given the ‘wrong’ conditions, very distant ground objects may cause false radar returns producing anomalous effects.
Having said that, these types of effects would be closely related to optical illusions that are anisotropic i.e. the location of the observer makes a significant difference to the observed phenomenon (the degree of distortion, as well as whether an illusion is perceived or not).
The fact that operators of multiple radars, at different locations, reported the same phenomenon over the same location, strongly suggests that the phenomenon was *not* the radar equivalent of an optical illusion, produced by a temperature inversion.
These days it would be possible combine recorded radar data from various sites to determine the degree of correlation between each set of data (although recorded data lose some information in the process of being digitized).